Biden has given his second major speech treating half the nation as fascists and thugs (it’s a long-standing project; see my January 30, 2021 essay Cancelling Half the Nation: Progressives Reach for One-Party Rule). This time the President eschewed a setting befitting a Leni Riefenstahl production, but kept that spirit in words. His told the audience that Trump is the ringleader of an unpatriotic and violent mob bent on destroying the Republic. He’s talking about tens of millions of America.
By “trying to rewrite the facts” of January 6, Trump is “trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election,” the President stormed. “Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest; it was a violent assault,” he insisted. “They were insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the Constitution; they were there to destroy the Constitution.”
Everything Biden said yesterday is part of the Big Lie. Trump’s speech delivered on the Ellipse on January 6, wherein he encouraged his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” march to the Capitol to give words of encouragement to the representatives who intended to challenge the certification of the November presidential election results, a statement in which Trump enumerated numerous grievances, was a textbook example of a man and the citizens around him properly exercising the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Here’s a convenient reminder of the First Amendment with the relevant clauses highlighted: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” I would like to think I didn’t need to share this text with readers, but given how widespread the ignorance is about the fundamental law of this nation, I have to.
As did Congress when it impeached Trump for exercising his First Amendment rights, Biden is telling you that the First Amendment is a threat to democracy—unless those who wield it (and then some) are allied with Biden and the Democrats (see the riots of 2020). Never forget that Biden’s administration works with Big Tech companies to censor speech. Never forget that its Biden’s national security apparatus that harnesses and intimidates citizens for their political and religious beliefs.
As for the riot, as I wrote in my December 22, 2023 essay The Continuing Campaign to Unperson Donald Trump, “Tossing into the crowd flash bang grenades, and firing upon the throng with rubber bullets and canisters of tear gas, the police instigated the violence outside the Capitol, while officers on the other side of the building invited protestors inside, where they milled about admiring the place and mostly staying within the velvet roped queue. Officers even invited the protestors into the chambers where legislators debate and vote—protestors adorned in patriotic garb and paraphernalia. Elsewhere, a Capitol police officer murdered a veteran.”
I continue in that essay: “Whatever the details, that the police instigated a riot at the Capitol that day does not make the political rally that occurred in Washington DC earlier that day an insurrection. However you define the thing, Trump didn’t cause it. He insisted to the assembled that they ‘peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.’ He invoked the people’s right to petition the government when he said moments before, ‘We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.’”
If you believe Trump perpetrated an insurrection, then you have convinced yourself of something far outside of any reasonable interpretation of the evidence. But let’s assume, as ridiculous as the insurrection clap-trap is, that everything Biden said in his speech is true. Does anybody really believe that Trump remains in office after January 20, 2021? How do an unarmed people with a small rabble among them keep the Capitol they never took? Assume they had taken the Capitol, do people really believe Trump doesn’t order the military to take back the Capitol? Assume military personnel risk their careers and protect the rabble, do people actually believe the military continues doing so after January 20 when Biden assumes the Office of the Presidency?
For your convenience, here’s the oath our soldiers take upon enlisting: “I [state your full name], Do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God (optional).”
Upon entering office on January 20th, having been certified President on January 6, and swearing his oath to the Constitution, Biden becomes the Commander-and-Chief of the armed services. Do people really believe that his order to the military—the first order of his presidency—to remove the rabble from the Capitol will go unheeded?
A coup does not happen with a dozen or so people smashing windows at the Capitol and maybe a thousand people milling about inside their Capitol, people “armed” with flags and standards and patriotic swag. A coup doesn’t involve sending back to a few states certifications that appear to be the result of widespread election rigging and fraud. For more than a hundred years, Presidents didn’t assume office until March 4 (this date remained in effect until the passage of the Twentieth Amendment in 1933). Democracy is not lost while Georgia checks its certification. On the contrary, democracy is lost when Georgia doesn’t check its certification (see Is There Evidence Joe Biden Won the 2020 Election?).
There was no insurrection. Trump did not incite a riot. The President voluntarily left office on January 20, 2021. There was a peaceful transfer of power. At any point along this chain of incontrovertible facts in asserting he contrary Biden and the Democrats look like complete fools. Assuming for the sake of argument that some of what Biden said is true, in its totality, granting the wild scenarios that must be assumed for the narrative to have any power at all, the propagandistic intent is so obvious as to alert a reasonable man to the possibility that the moral panic over January 6 and the persecution of those peacefully present at the Capitol that day is noise to distract the people from the fact that the republic is already lost—or that it will be if Democrats prevail in 2024.
“Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is what the 2024 election is all about,” Biden said in his speech. “The choice is clear. Donald Trump’s campaign is about him, not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future. He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power. Our campaign is different.”
Here Biden’s speech writers are unaware that they said the quiet part out loud and thus put the lie to punch line. For Democrats, Donald Trump’s campaign is about him. Democrats want the public to obsess over the past because they desperately need the public to not see the future the Party has in store for them. Democrats are terrified of Trump in power because they won’t be. They will be unable to stop investigations into November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021. They will be unable to prevent the deconstruction of the permanent political stratum in Washington. A Trump presidency risks the power elite losing control of the military-industrial complex and the forever wars they monger. Even the national security state is at risk. It means the invasion of our country by military-age foreign males will, potentially dashing their plans for the disorder they need to finally establish a one-party corporate state.
In a very real sense, everything is at stake on November 5, 2024. For Democrats, political control over the corporate state apparatus they depend on for the managed decline of the Republic and for advancing the transnational agenda, as well as for their personal enrichment, is at risk if the democrats lose the election. For the rest of us, the greatest republic in the history of mankind is put in peril.
freedom and reason 